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Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food / Jon Krampner

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The Aussies have their vegemite, the Europeans their nutella, but the sandwich spread that unequivocally and perhaps uniquely defines the American palate is peanut butter.  This book tells you all you need to know about peanut butter from its humble origins (no, George Washington Carver was not its inventor) to the consolidation of the triumvirate of national brands: Jiffy, Skippy, and Peter Pan.  

Did you know that peanut butter tastes more flavorful when made from Spanish, Valencia, or Virginia peanuts and not the less tasty (but easier to process) florunners?  A major “improvement” in peanut butter production was eliminating the oil separation which still characterizes natural brands.  Unfortunately for the consumer, the solution to a creamy, more stable spread was adding partially hydrogenated oil, this being the poster child for trans-fats, the nutritional bad boy in recent years.  (The U.S. government calls standard grocery store peanut butter trans-fat free because it contains less than 0.5g of trans fats per serving, but it does contain trans-fat. And who eats a recommended serving?)  A manufacturer added chocolate to peanut butter in the early 1900s, but the marriage was not a success—an idea before its time.  The peanut butter industry is almost obsessively secretive about its production lines, though one wonders with recent salmonella contamination of a national brand if this is less a concern about industrial espionage and more about meeting health codes.  Plumpy'nut is a fortified peanut paste that is a major tool in fighting malnutrition and starvation in developing nations.  Peanut butter is manufactured not just for use as a sandwich spread, it is used in such popular confections as ice cream, cookies, cookie mixes, sauces, Reeses pieces and Reeses cups in all sizes and permutations!

This kind of nonfiction history can be fascinating, and all the more so in Georgia, where peanuts may outshine peaches as a cash crop.


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